


Just Boys

by beforetheymakemerun



Category: The Rolling Stones
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-29 23:13:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20444150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beforetheymakemerun/pseuds/beforetheymakemerun
Summary: Mick thinks back to the Edith Grove days when he first fell for Keith. Fluffy fluff





	Just Boys

**Author's Note:**

> I've written fan fiction before but this is my first Stones fic. If anyone's interested maybe it could have other chapters?? Wanted to give it a try for fun

We were just kids. 

We were boys, really, and we could have ended up being any sort of boys. We could have stayed in Dartford for the rest of our lives, probably would have. I might have become a local politician or an accountant. Luckily, times were changing. When I think back, I think of how normal it all seemed, if uncharted, and miserable, and magical in the way youth is. 

I remember that Keith seemed like every other bloke I knew at the time, and also how completely different he was. We were all disgusting in Edith Grove. We took pride in it. I suppose we had to, since we had no other way to be. Spoiled enough to not have grown up washing dishes, and now poor enough to not afford dish soap. Laundry was out of the question. Heat was a luxury. 

In the Edith Grove days, it all felt unimportant in a way, because I was still in school, still pretty sure I was going to follow the same drudging route as my father. Life was unending in the way adult life seemed rightly to be. At night, I wrapped all the blankets from my bed around me, and tried to read an economics textbook before I gave up, slept, awoke, and did everything over again. 

All that time, Keith had both ears tuned to the guitar. I left in the morning when he was up drinking tea and picking something cute, and when I came back he was drinking a beer if he was lucky and plinking along to something with Brian. “Plinking” is not charitable, but sometimes the constant noise was too much. I was in love with the music, but I wanted to remain slightly outside of it. 

“Can I bum a fag?” Keith asked me one terribly cold night. What I remember most clearly from those days was being cold. I was cursing the heat wave we’d had in August. I couldn’t believe I’d ever complained of being too hot.

“I haven’t any.” Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, I wasn’t getting up to look in my bag. And also fuck Keith, I thought, he didn’t have to be out all day, he just sat around eating the food that was supposed to be partially mine and playing guitar, listening to records on the busted player. 

“Touchy.”

“Fuck off.”

Keith lurched forward and grabbed at my school bag. 

“Oy! Get out!” I was up too now, forfeiting what little warmth I’d accumulated under the blankets.

“Ah-ha!” Keith had found a stray cigarette tumbling around inside the bag. It was sooty with pencil shavings and other rubbish but he stuck it in his mouth, pulled a match from his pocket, and lit it on the fireplace hearth, a real show-off.

“Well fuck you.” I held out my hand, and after a few drags, he gave me the fag. 

“Got to stay warm some bloody way,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” I re-positioned the blankets and returned to my book.

Keith got up to sit on the bed, next to me, so he could pluck the cigarette from my mouth. I let him. He might have gotten on my nerves like no one else—well, other than Brian, who was also completely if not more insufferable. But we were in this together. No one else new how fucking cold it was here at night but us. 

When he was through, Keith stuck the cigarette back in my mouth and picked up his guitar.

“You think you could lay off for five minutes so I could get some studying done?”

If it was Brian, a seething rejoinder would have followed, but it was Keith. I still remembered what he looked like as a little boy, and that meant something. Even if neither of us consciously knew what it meant. 

“Alright,” he said with a shrug, laying the guitar flat. 

“Brilliant,” I said flatly. He took the cigarette back. 

I tried to read while Keith fidgeted. He cracked each one of his knuckles, moving the palm of one hand down the back of the other. Then he pulled the fingers back like a sling shot, then wrenched each one forward in turn, until he’d produced every conceivable crack. I couldn’t tell if he was doing it to spite me, or if he was mindlessly tuned to his inner world. I’d seen him do this routine before. I was pretty sure he was simply lost in thought. Even though my eyes stared straight at the page, I didn’t take in a single word. I was peripherally transfixed. I wanted him to go through each knuckle again.

“Do mine, then,” I said, offering my left hand. I couldn’t believe I’d said it, but it was also a laugh. Who the fuck pops some else’s knuckles?

“I thought Mister Important was reading.”

I kept my hand hovering and he took it, scoffing. Then he yanked on my index finer and each bone catastrophically separated. “Fuck!” I thrashed my hand away.

Keith laughed, letting his head fall back against the wall, lazy. Everything about Keith was lazy, even in the fucking cold. 

I cradled my hand. See, the problem was I’d started to notice the other blokes in school in a way I never had before. I looked at their jaws and their long fingers, the way their shoulders moved under their button-down shirts. Sometimes I watched Keith’s bare feet, or noticed how many holes he had in his socks. Sometimes I measured his wrists with my eyes, watched his throat bob when he laughed in the way that sounded too deep for his age. Stupid bloody stuff like that. I liked girls too, so I didn’t let it bother me too terribly much. I’d always get along fine. Except when I couldn’t stop looking at the shadow that grew on Keith’s cheeks. 

I knew he was oblivious to me in that way because he was oblivious to anyone in that way. I wasn’t sure he’d even had a proper girlfriend, and I knew anything romantic that had ever happened to him was initiated by the bird, not Keith, because he couldn’t show a sustained amount of interest in anything not producing the blues. At least I had a leg up, there. But that was silly. I looked back at my book.

“I’d say five minutes are up just about.” He propped his guitar again and hit a few notes.

I took the cigarette from his mouth. It was ash by now. He was using a coffee cup from weeks ago as an ashtray. The coffee had had milk and was now pleasantly moldy at the bottom. I took a final drag and dropped it in.

Thing was, I was fairly certain this would be the rest of my life. Living in some shit tip with Keith, admiring him from afar with no great urgency, working a dull job, freezing to death. There was no need to do anything because there was nothing to do, because there was pleasure in sitting next to him, because he liked me in some unstated way that was enough. That’s what I’d thought. That night felt different. I made myself believe that he felt it too, even if it was a fraternal comfort. There was something in that, wasn’t there?

Keith started in on the new “Love Me Do,” and I hummed along. 

Keith glanced at me, smiling slightly. 

“So plea-ea-ea-ease,” I mumbled, hardly signing, suddenly aware of the double meaning and trying not to blush or look at Keith. I was warm, hot, a fucking miracle. Keith joined in with a high harmony like John does on the record.

“Someone to love, somebody new. Someone to love, someone like you.” I stared straight ahead, singing like I never did, wooden and uncomfortable. Keith was oblivious, that prat. 

When I looked away from the wall, pictureless, paint chipped, I watched his hands, the way he found the notes thoughtlessly. That stupid old guitar. He’d honest to God tried to tie broken strings back together, just to keep playing. He didn’t have a pick left. They were gone to the filth of the flat. He developed callouses below his fingernails and on his fingertips, I knew from when our hands scrabbled for the same need. The other day I boiled a bone in a pot and we fought over who got the bigger bowl of “soup.” I grinned at the thought. It was all so ridiculous, and in the right moments, like this, when I quieted the constant worry of the future, when the cold almost twinkled, it seemed romantic. In a Dickens sort of way. And of course I would have given him the whole bloody pot of soup if he asked for it, the fucking wanker. 

The song tapered off, neither of us remembering how it ended. Or perhaps Keith did, that would have been one thing he was aware of, but he let it die. 

“See, you don’t want to do your bloody boring homework, I knew it.”

I didn’t look over. “I gotta sleep.”

“Old man.”

“You can’t stay in unless you’re going to sleep, too.”

“I know, I know, you need yer beauty rest.”

“I do,” I said, finally looking at him, batting my eyelashes. I was trying to recover, act queer so he wouldn’t think I could be.

He grabbed his guitar by the neck, ready to hoist himself up. “G’night, Mickey.” 

He was wearing about ten jumpers, but somehow it just made him look skinnier. The top one was white and cable knit, only off-white because it was the biggest jumper and therefore always the outermost. Something desperate snapped inside me. “You could stay,” I said in a rush.

He raised his eyebrows. Paused. “It’s not like I really give a shit.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not that tired, so you can stay, for a bit,” I said, hoping I could couch my desperation in allowing him to occupy his own room.

“How bloody generous.”

“Shut it.” I lay back, heaping the blankets over myself. My mum had given me a down quilt, extravagant, which always felt cold but kept me warmer than Keith and Brian’s blankets put together. I’d fucking die for that duvet. I pulled it up to my nose, breathing my hot breath into them, shivering on purpose to generate heat. 

Keith set his guitar on the floor, picked up the harmonica Brian was trying to teach me. He blew a few desultory notes, then lay back on the bed next to me, tilting the harmonica in the light as if he’d never seen it before. “Don’t know why you bother with this fucking thing.”

I couldn’t help laughing. 

“Ay, and give me some of these blankets you fucking twat I’m freezing.”

I held up the down comforter, he scooted under. I swear it got 10 degrees hotter. I almost wanted out. But I didn’t.

Keith stared at the ceiling, our heads just centimeters apart. There was an airless moment. I thought of turning off the light, or running from the room. Maybe I should turn to my side and pretend nothing had happen. Maybe I should tell him to leave, harshly. 

He glanced at me for one moment, the faintest smile, and I knew. I knew that he knew.

My whole body flooded with something that was cold and hot. I grinned, couldn’t help in. I leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “G’night Keith.”


End file.
